Movable Type Monday: Updates on MT5

Happy Monday, folks! This week, Six Apart posted a couple of blog entries updating us on the status of Movable Type 5. First thing to note is that the North American and European release will not be tomorrow. Instead, MT5 will be released on December 16. The reason given is they need more time to work on developer documentation. Since a lack of documentation has been an issue in the past, this is probably a good move.

Also for MT5, 6A’s Beau Smith wrote up a new installation and upgrade guide. This set of instructions covers a lot of different scenarios, with additional reference material so you understand what is going on. This is probably the most extensive installation documentation for MT I’ve ever seen. Good work, Beau.

Finally, 6A hosted a conference call last week to answer people’s questions about MT5. It’s worth listening to the whole thing, but here are some of the highlights:

On why Motion was left out of MT5: A matter of time and resources. MT5 makes a lot of changes to the UI that were incompatible with the templates and plugins that make up Motion. The Motion theme, along with Action Streams and microblogging, will return, but no timeline has been set. Also, they felt that TypePad Motion was an acceptable alternative in the interim.

MT5 Enterprise will not be released until sometime next year, probably the second half of 2010.

They reiterated that the new Website object is required in MT5. You cannot create a Blog that is not a part of a Website.

Users with Blog-level access will not see Website options.

When you upgrade, Blogs will be combined into Websites based on the Blog URLs. You’ll then need to rename the Website and customize it as you like.

The new theme, Pico, is a blog-only theme. It is not a full Website theme. The Professional Template Set has been upgraded to a Website theme.

Another plugin that was removed due to time constraints was Zemanta. They hope to bring it back soon.

The ability to login via Yahoo OpenID was removed. Apparently, Yahoo made a change to their service which broke the functionality. Although the change was minor (the domain changed), it was after a code freeze, so it was left out. It will be restored in the next release.

There was a question of whether it would be necessary to do a wipe and install of MT5, instead of an upgrade. They said an upgrade should be fine, though if you have Motion and/or Action Streams installed you might have some issues with those.

Licensing should be simpler than before, though how much an upgrade will cost will depend on what current license you have.

Also, since upgrading MT5 could be daunting for a lot of users, 6A is planning to list developers that are “certified” to help with upgrades.

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Comments

There was a question of whether it would be necessary to do a wipe and install of MT5, instead of an upgrade. They said an upgrade should be fine, though if you have Motion and/or Action Streams installed you might have some issues with those.

This was my question, but you’ve misinterpreted it a bit. Yes, an upgrade is fine, in the sense that most of what’s really important for an upgrade is actually in the database. What was being referred to was wiping the app files(rather than overwriting), and does still apply. It was in reference to this bug and was subsequently added to Beau’s new upgrade docs.

@Su, I understood the question, but I guess I wasn’t clear. I assumed it was understood that I just meant wiping the files. I’ll be more careful with my words in the future so I don’t cause somebody to delete their blog. 🙂